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PostPosted: March 31st, 2011, 12:29 am 
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Joined: June 11th, 2008, 3:16 pm
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Location: Barcelona
I want to play some games downloaded from the internet in real hardware (NEC PC-8801 MC, FM77 AV40SX and X1 Turbo Z). The problem is the different sizes of the floppy images. :(

With PC-98, FM-Towns and X68000 there are no problems for writing them back to real floppies because the size of that images are always the same in all the games (except a few games for X68000 Compact 3'5" and some early PC-9801 games).

Why the games of systems like PC-88, FM77 (and FM-7), X1, have so much different sizes?
I thought that all of them were 320 KB and 640 KB (some FM77 games are 640 KB as it states: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/com ... st=1&c=375 ).

I can only write back to floppy (5'25" and 3'5") those few PC-88, FM77 and X1 dumped games that have an image size of 320 KB. Exactly: 348.848 Bytes (in .D77/.D88 format) ------> 327.680 Bytes (converted to .IMG format).

I format the floppies using OmniFlop with "FM77 format (320 KB)". Then, when I try to write the floppy image in the previously formatted floppy, the only files I can write fine (and boot on real hardware) are those with that "correct size" (.IMG files with size 327.680 Bytes).

The question is: How can I write other games with different sizes? When I try to write a game with a smaller size OmniFlop shows a message "The file is samller than the disk. Not all the disk have been written" and the game doesn't boot on the real hardware. When I try to write a .IMG file bigger than 327.680 Bytes it shows "Image is bigger than disk."

Recently, I sent a "Map Disk File" I make with OmniFlop of an original PC-88 game I own (the only I own): "Klax". Thanks to that, the author of OmniFlop have been able to add a new format in OmniFlop: "NEC PC-8801 360 KB" (exactly 380.448 Bytes in .D77/.D88 or 368.128 Bytes in .IMG) and it works fine. The problem is that seems there are too few PC-88, FM77 and X1 games that uses that 360 KB size (probably there are a lot of games with that size but they have not been dumped yet).

How can we write those floppy images with a different size than 327.680 Bytes? Which software was used for dumping PC-88, FM77 and X1 games that are nowadays in the internet in disk image format (.D77, .D88, ...) for the use with emulators? Probably that software will be useful too for writting them back to floppy.

Any ideas?


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PostPosted: March 31st, 2011, 2:11 am 
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Joined: May 15th, 2010, 1:35 am
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The dumps are probably fine - some games used weird sector sizes for copy protection or other reasons.

Your best chance is DITT. However, DITT needs to run in true DOS mode (not a command prompt) on a Win9x or earlier computer.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1cv1ys


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PostPosted: March 31st, 2011, 1:45 pm 
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Joined: March 18th, 2011, 8:45 am
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Location: Madrid, Spain
Indeed, DITT seems the right choice here. IIRC, I've dumped FM77 images bigger than 350KB sucessfully.

I would also add that combined disk images (only for emulators!) are a real mess with all this variable size affair. How the hell can be splitted into single images again?, I'm usually examining the image with an hex editor looking for strings like "DISK_A", "DISK_2"; but it's a real PITA.

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PostPosted: March 31st, 2011, 2:43 pm 
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repoMan wrote:
How the hell can be splitted into single images again?, I'm usually examining the image with an hex editor looking for strings like "DISK_A", "DISK_2"; but it's a real PITA.


VFIC -> output to D88.


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PostPosted: April 1st, 2011, 8:03 am 
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Joined: March 18th, 2011, 8:45 am
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Location: Madrid, Spain
It works, thanks!. Anyway, seems that not all the images are converted, some of them are reporting format errors, maybe they're corrupted... :(

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PostPosted: April 3rd, 2011, 7:46 am 
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Joined: July 5th, 2010, 8:17 pm
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I've been able to split most combined d88 images with d88e (namely the java version, d88ej, since I'm on a MacOSX system), unless the emulator has appended some save state or other garbage at the end of the disk.

I will give vfic a try, anyway.


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PostPosted: October 29th, 2011, 2:33 am 
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Joined: September 18th, 2011, 12:19 am
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etabeta wrote:
I've been able to split most combined d88 images with d88e (namely the java version, d88ej, since I'm on a MacOSX system), unless the emulator has appended some save state or other garbage at the end of the disk.

I will give vfic a try, anyway.

Hm, d88e / d88ej? I just googled for those, but I have been unsuccessful to find anything about them...

Do you happen to have the address of the official website? Or even download links?

I'm personally looking for some tool that'll allow me to combine some PC-8801, X1 turbo etc. images into one, to make it more usable for people less familiar with this kind of gaming.

Anyway, thanks in advance. :)


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PostPosted: November 20th, 2011, 2:05 pm 
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Joined: July 5th, 2010, 8:17 pm
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sorry for the late reply, but I've been really busy in the past few months.

anyway, I had discovered a link to that util in this very same forum: http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/forum/vi ... =3390#3390

good luck


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PostPosted: September 24th, 2012, 3:49 am 
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Joined: September 22nd, 2012, 9:59 am
Posts: 7
FM 7 and the early version of FM77 only use 2D format.


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